Security is an important feature of secure devices. Smart cards are one example of secure devices in wide use. Contactless smart cards appeared several years ago in the form of electronic tags. Today contactless smart cards may be used in the fields of electronic ticketing, transport and access control. More recently they have started to be used for electronic payment transactions.
Both contact and contactless smartcards are vulnerable to security attacks. Security attacks need to be prevented in various secure applications, for example, electronic payment, ePassport, traditional banking, or car security. A smartcard may provide security in the form of a hardware token. Encryption may be used in the smartcard to protect information from unauthorized disclosure. Plain text may be turned into cipher text via an encryption algorithm, and then decrypted back into plain text using the same method. In this way, the actual data exchange channel between smart card and reader may not be ‘in the clear’, and therefore may not be readable by an unauthorized third party or eavesdropper.
The small amount of memory and power available on a smartcard limit the size of the encryption algorithm used on the smartcard. This makes the breach of encryption algorithms a little bit easier. Therefore, there is anti-hacking related art that addresses the encryption part of the communication, but it does not target physical attacks, for example, tapping internal signals in the smartcard where information is not yet encrypted.